Thorsten Heit wrote: > Hi, > > I hope this is the right forum to ask... > > I have a HP ProLiant ML350G6 on which I recently installed Solaris 11 > Express. The machine has two network interfaces (Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5715; > driver: bge) which are both connected to our department's switch. According > to one of the network guys each port on that switch is capable of working at > 100MBit full duplex. Unfortunately the network interfaces only work at > 100MBit half duplex for some unknown reasons after a boot having auto > negotiation on. > > To verify that this is not a Solaris-only issue, I booted from a Ubuntu Live > CD that showed the same behaviour. Using ethtool I can force the NICs to work > at full duplex speed. Hooray.
That's the expected set of symptoms if the remote end of the link is "forced" into full-duplex mode. When link duplex is forced, negotiation is disabled. The standard requires that if you negotiate and fail (because, for example, the peer isn't negotiating), you must fall back to half-duplex. Thus, with one side forced full-duplex and the other set to negotiate, you end up with an undetected (and undetectable) mismatch. (The right way to say "I prefer full-duplex" is to enable autonegotiation and let it do its thing. Some admins are just confused about it, and think that "forcing" means something other than breaking negotiation. Oh well.) Getting your network administrator to repair that switch configuration might be the best long-term solution -- so you don't face this problem again with some other system. > Back to Solaris I tried the following commands: > > /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/bge1 adv_autoneg_cap 0 > /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/bge1 adv_100fdx_cap 1 > /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/bge1 adv_100hdx_cap 0 That should still do it. I suggest filing a bug. Having the link stuck down when in forced mode sounds like a pretty basic error to me. -- James Carlson 42.703N 71.076W <carls...@workingcode.com> _______________________________________________ networking-discuss mailing list networking-discuss@opensolaris.org
